Space Siege Hands-on

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Gas Powered returns to its action RPG roots with this upcoming sci-fi game.

By Jason Ocampo

After moonlighting with the real-time strategy genre with the Supreme Commander games, Gas Powered Games returns to the action role-playing genre with Space Siege. Due out later this month, Space Siege will have you face off with an army of genocidal aliens, which is a far cry from the days of hacking and slashing your way through demon and goblin hordes. And, as I discovered playing around with a near-final version of Space Siege, it's much more action-intensive than Gas Powered's earlier Dungeon Siege games.

This is an action RPG, so the focus is on killing things, collecting loot, and becoming even more powerful so you can kill bigger and badder things. It's a vicious cycle that, when done correctly, compels you to keep playing because there's always one more reward within easy grasp. As such, the plot mainly serves as a basic exposition as to why you're killing things, and Space Siege's story feels like a mishmash of sci-fi story staples. Earth is destroyed by a warlike alien race, and the remnants of humanity flee aboard massive colony vessels. You play as a robotics expert and soldier on one of these vessels which gets boarded by the aliens. After a brief battle, the human crew seals itself in their sleep chambers while the ship's AI system gasses the passageways. However, when you awaken weeks later, you discover that the aliens didn't die from the gas and have been running amok, so it's up to you to deal with them.

Alien homicide.

Though it takes place aboard a large starship, this is the equivalent of a high-tech dungeon crawl. Still, the addition of firearms does help change the dynamic, since you can engage foes at a distance, rather than wait for them to charge up to you before you attack. There are a variety of firearms, such as submachine guns and energy beams that you can swap between, and if an opponent gets too close you can switch to an energy blade to inflict serious melee damage. However, one of your most potent weapons is the environment, which is littered with compressed gas canisters and explosive crates and barrels. Shoot a canister and it takes off and slams into anything in its path, showing off the physics engine at work.

Enemies drop loot mainly in the form of upgrade parts, which are essentially a form of currency used to purchase various improvements and enhancements. Each weapon that you have can be upgraded, boosting attack speed, critical hit chance, damage, and more. You can upgrade your armor, increasing its defensive value, protection against certain types of attacks, and such. There are upgrades that you can make to HR-V, a companion droid that acts like a heavily-armed pet; you can boost his armor, attack speed, critical hit chance, health, resistances, damage, and more. And then you can use upgrade parts to create items, such as health kits. There are multiple levels of upgrades, with each successive level costing more than the previous one, so there's quite a bit of customization that can be done here.

At the same time, enemies don't really drop traditional action RPG "loot" in the form of weapons or armor. Diablo, the progenitor of the action-RPG genre, featured plenty of killing and loot. As such, almost every action RPG made since then features gratuitous amounts of both. You can collect so much loot in many action RPGs that it can get tedious having to head back to a town to sell off the surplus stuff; Dungeon Siege tried to address this by giving you a pack mule to carry junk. The solution Gas Powered came up with in Space Siege might not please action RPG traditionalists, but it's an elegant way to avoid the hassles of loot collection.

If I had one complaint about the Dungeon Siege games it's that they were a bit too automated for their own good; you didn't feel much interaction since the game took care of combat through auto-attacks. That's something that's been rectified with Space Siege, as much of it feels like an action game that requires you to input attack commands manually. Left clicking the mouse will cause you to move, while right clicking the mouse will attack a target. The tricky part is getting used to the camera, which is controlled by the W, A, S, and D keys. A and D rotate the camera, while W and S zoom in or out. This is the kind of game where you always want to move the camera around to better see the action.

What do you want to upgrade today?

There are deeper role-playing elements as you get further in the game. As you level up, you can dump points into various skills and abilities. However, the really big decisions come down to cybernetic upgrades that can unlock new skills and abilities that were previously unavailable to you. So do you swap out your organic arms, legs, spine, and more for robotic parts? Or do you try and stay as human as possible? It poses an interesting question, and my decision was to try and get through the game by upgrading my weapons and armor as much as possible, and only use cybernetic parts unless absolutely needed. I found these kinds of decisions to be much more compelling than the traditional action RPG dilemmas of having to choose between two or three different sets of armor or weapons. The latter seem mostly cosmetic, but the former actually feels like it has long-lasting implications.

With that said, there's a lot that also seems a bit underwhelming about Space Siege. The story and the characterizations lack the mystery or the delivery of something like BioShock, a game that captured the sensation of being in a spooky environment effectively. Space Siege lacks that kind of atmosphere, and the setting of a spaceship in deep space seems wasted. Where there should be darkness and flickering lights and dark shapes lurking in every corner, there's basically another moderately lit room or corridor.

Still, I found myself much more engaged playing Space Siege than I did playing Dungeon Siege, which is progress. Whether Space Siege can maintain that interest throughout the rest of the game is a question to be reserved for the review, but it's worth noting for now that it appears that Gas Powered has learned from Dungeon Siege and made an action RPG with a good mix of action and role-playing.